As the anti-nuclear movement spread, “Hiroshima” became less an unfortunate event in Japan’s past than a semi-sacred one in world history, to be commemorated by morally serious people no matter their nationality. Tanimoto promoted “Hiroshima Day” and by the early 1960s there were protests and memorials on that day throughout the world. Denmark alone held demonstrations in 45 towns in 1963.
By then, Hiroshima occupied a similar place in public memory to Auschwitz, the other avatar of the unspeakable. The resemblance ran deep. Both terms identified specific events within the broader violence of the second world war – highlighting the Jews among Hitler’s victims, and the atomic bomb victims among the many Japanese who were bombed – and marked them as morally distinct. Both Hiroshima and Auschwitz had been the site of “holocausts” (indeed, early writers more often used that term to describe atomic war than European genocide). And both Hiroshima and Auschwitz sent forth a new type of personage: the “survivor”, a hallowed individual who had borne witness to a historically unique horror. What Elie Wiesel did to raise the stature of Europe’s survivors, Tanimoto did for Japan’s. In their hands, Hiroshima and Auschwitz shared a message: never forget, never again.
Yet the analogy was imperfect. The European Holocaust was the work of many hands. Mass killing, ordered from on high, had to be carried out by countless willing executioners, who snatched the victims from their homes, stuffed them on to trains, kept them in camps, shot them, gassed them and disposed of their corpses. By contrast, the nuclear apparatus, once in place, could be set into motion by a handful of men in only a few minutes.
This also meant, the world soon realised, that another Hiroshima could come by accident. The murder of Europe’s Jews was many things, but it wasn’t inadvertent. In nuclear standoffs, a plane crash, system malfunction or miscalibrated threat could all plausibly trigger annihilation.
Nuclear standoffs are dangerous by design. As in the game of chicken, the point is to set off on a collision course and frighten your opponent into swerving first. “Fill the nuclear glass to the brim,” Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev advised his colleagues, “but don’t pour the last drop.”
Such brinksmanship requires leaders to quell their doubts, possibly even to convince themselves that they’re willing to see the glass spill over. Perhaps some are. “The whole idea is to kill the bastards,” said US general Thomas Power, when presented in 1960 with a nuclear plan designed to minimise casualties. “Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.” This is the man who led the US Strategic Air Command – responsible for its nuclear bombs and missiles – during the Cuban missile crisis.